The Astros beat the Padres Friday night on a walk-off pop up. Video at the link.
I take away two lessons from this:
- Put the ball in play. Any ball in play, in a game winning situation, might wind up with sa safe call that at least extends the inning. With two outs, and runners moving, someone could score from any base on a miscue.
- When compiling defensive statistics, count the pop outs. When I used to calculate the Probabilistic Model of Range (PMR) sometimes people suggested there wasn’t that much information gained by including pop ups, since someone usually caught them. I disagreed then, and still disagree. That play is a reason why.
You could also file that play under Good Teams Get the Lucky Breaks.